lovin’ languages!

A few cuentos cortitos:

Sofia, my roommate, is from Bulgaria, and two of her friends who are visiting Spain came over for dinner on Monday and we had language soup! Sofia’s friends’ English is impeccable—it’s the best English I’ve heard since I’ve arrived, except for from the tourists—and they also speak Bulgarian (obviously). Sofia speaks Bulgarian and Spanish. I speak Spanish and English. We were a very lively group, but throughout the whole evening, only 3 of the 4 could ever participate in one conversation. The three of them would talk animatedly for a while, then one would turn to me and translate something, then three of us would continue the topic, then I would turn to Sofia and translate a little bit, then Sofia and I would carry on, then Sofia would turn back to the other two and start talking about something new. It was crazy! And great!

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All of the people I work with speak to me in Spanish, and they speak to each other in Catalan. There’s an English department in the high school where I work, and that’s where the teachers hang out when they’re not in class. There are usually always one or two people in the department, so we sit at the table and talk about all sorts of things. Everything I say is in Spanish or English, and all remarks directed at me are in Spanish. However, as soon as one of the teachers turns to their neighor, they automatically switch to Catalan, so conversations for me are a bit like listening to a badly-tuned radio: I can only understand for a minute or so before the language switches, and if I wait for another minute it usually switches back, but the conversation doesn’t restart between switches, so large pieces go missing.

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In the schools, most of the kids were born here and are here to stay, but in every class there’s usually one or two English/Irish/Scottish kids, a German, and somebody from Latin America. All the kids have learned Catalan to a greater or lesser degree: in the first grade class that I help out in, there’s one kid whose parents are from somewhere in Latin America, and he speaks in a really cute Spanish/Catalan mixture and seems to think that if he speaks to me really really slowly, I might someday answer him back in Spanish. Tough luck—before I arrived, the teachers told me that the kids aren’t supposed to know that I speak Spanish. That system worked well enough, until one of the teachers left for a week an I was supposed to give her classes. It was a lot of fun being the real teacher for a change, and most of the classes were great. The fourth graders, however, got it into their head that it was some sort of field day, and they were absolutely horrible. Since I had no idea what disciplinary actions are acceptable (when kids misbehave, all I’ve seen the teachers do is shout at them) it went pretty poorly. Ah, well. I remember being a pretty horrible fourth grader myself, and so I’m not beating myself up about having a few tough class days. The teacher got back from her week-long training and now I’m back to being the assistant, which is much nicer. She does the shouting and I do the activities.

Anyways, sorry for diverging onto the subject of nine-year-olds who are testing their limits: I wanted to talk about languages! There’s one kid in the fourth grade class who was born in England, and he lived there until he was four, and he has the best English in the class and thinks it’s his duty to translate every word I say for all the other kids. The teacher usually has to correct his translantions, though, because he trips over his words in Catalan, and then the teacher tells him to be QUIET! In the first-grade class, most of the kids talk to themselves while they color or draw or whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing, and I’ve noticed that a lot of them mutter phrases in English: “Tidy up! Sit down! Be quiet!”, which just goes to show what they hear the most. When the teacher wasn’t there, one kid even asked me, starting off in Spanish and ending in Catalan: “¿Y por qué tenemos que mantener el silenci?” (Why do we have to be silent?) All the kids chat to each other in Catalan, and they talk to me in Castilian (Spanish), and I only talk to them in English.

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Every Wednesday and Saturday is market day in Santanyí, and most of the people who sell things at the market are immigrants, so I hear languages that I can’t even name. Most of the people who shop in the vegetables section are from here, so the common language is Catalan, but in the other sections of the market, the shoppers generally tend to be German. I went to a store to buy a towel, and the proprietress and a customer were happily chatting away in Swiss German. I went into a butcher shop to buy chicken and as I was leaving, I heard the customer after me ask the owner, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch? No? English? No… ah…” (which is really strange. Most store owners have learned at least sales English) so I popped my head back in and said, “Ich habe ein Bisschen Deutsch gelernt…” and the lady told me that her kid had allergies, so she wanted to make sure that the hamburgers didn’t have eggs. The store owner kept saying: “Eight? Eight hamburgers?” and the lady was saying, “No, not eight: egg, Eier…” and, of course, on my mission of good-will, I forgot the word in Spanish for “egg” and could only think of the word in Catalan: ou, which I mispronounced so badly that the owner couldn’t understand me, either.

Except on market days, Santanyí doesn’t quite swarm with tourists as does Cala d’Or (the first town where I stayed—see tourist heaven, October 5) and I’ve figured out which public busses are generally filled with more tourists, so I try to avoid those. The boom bus times always run late, because there are usually swarms and swarms of people all crowding toward the door of the bus, which inevitably is not the right bus but every person must ask, “Is this the bus to Palma?” “Geht dieser Bus nach Palma?” “Je vais a Palma,” etc. Almost everybody talks to the bus driver in their own language, and I’ve never seen a bus driver here who speaks more than Spanish and Catalan. The bus system is rather strange, too, so it’s not like you can just hop on a bus and expect to get to where the schedule declares you will arrive: to get from Cala d’Or to Santanyí, for example, is 14 km, and it generally takes about 45 minutes from the scheduled time of departure to arrival. The procedure is: one bus comes roaring around the corner about ten minutes late, and everybody swarms up to the door. People getting off the bus fight their way through the crowd, then the driver starts selling tickets, but it’s not the bus that’s actually going anywhere. It’s rather funny to watch all of the gesticulating when the driver tries to tell people to get off the bus when they’ve already bought their ticket, and they have to wait for the next bus, no, the next bus, but, like I said, the bus drivers don’t speak English, so they end up saying something like, “Nesh boos!” so not much progress happens. The nesh boos eventually comes, and then everybody crowds on and waves their ticket around and shouts “Palma! Palma!” and then the bus goes a few kilometers and everybody has to get on another bus, and sometimes that bus goes straight to Santanyí where I can get off and leave all the Palma-goers in peace, and sometimes it meanders through a few other towns. I’m glad I’m now living in Santanyí, rather than having to commute from Cala d’Or—what with my Bulgarian roommate and our conversations in Spanish and her friends who speak English and my colleagues who speak Catalan and lost German people on the street who speak German—life is a lot easier!